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Multiple-clones, multiple-rootstock — has become convention in vineyard, although it’s insider talk you usually hear at tradeshows and winery backstages.

My recent wine column explored the increasing use of clones on labels — sticking them out there as a marketing tool. I talked to Steven Mirassou about the trend. He mentions clones on his Steven Kent cabernet sauvignon and La Rochelle pinot noir as a way to set his work apart.

Classic Clones are those historicaly planted in California.

I had always thought that pinot noir had the greatest clonal diversity of wine grapes. But Steve said cabernet sauvignon shows just as much diversity, but cab’s big nature conceals those differences.

Clonal diversity is great for growers, and often consumers. In the vineyards, clonal diversity offers a hedge against blights and bad weather. In the cellar and glass, a good mix of clones offers a blend that is more complex than a single clone. La Rochelle’s pinot proved this point.

Early victims of the Great Recession, Scott and Mary Ann Bubb both lost their jobs within months of each other in 2009.

Scott , then 52, had 35 years at the New Holland plant in Belleville, Pennsylvania, making farm equipment. Mary Ann was an office manager for a dentist who was scaling back his practice. He found in 2006 the plant would close in three years. Just months later after Scott walked out the factory gate for the first time, Mary Ann learned the dentist was scaling back his practice and she wouldn’t be needed.

He and his wife had difficult kitchen table conversations.

“What was I going to do? If I went back into manufacturing, I’d start at $10 an hour,” he said. “I told Mary Ann, whatever we do, it’s got to be something we love.”

The Bubbs has an ace in the hole. For 30 years when he wasn’t making tractors, Scott was making wine, and became one of most decorated amateur winemakers in the nation. The economic setback would have devastated many. But losing their jobs prompted the Bubbs to go pro. They set out to open a winery and launched Seven Mountains Wine Cellar in 2008.

Seven Mountains tasting room is about a mile down a country road of State Route 322 surrounded by Bald Eagle State Forest.

The winery is basically in the Bubb’s front yard.

Seven Mountains' tasting bar looks like a barrel. Get it?

“Mary Ann tells people we have the best job in the world,” Scott said. “We drink on the job and walk home.”

When I checked in on them early this year, they were doing great. Faithful clientele and the curious had been buying up their wine so fast, they doubled production the first year, from 4,000 gallons to 8,000 gallons. Being just a few minutes from Penn State University helps the wineries’ We Are White Cayuga and We Are Blue Blueberry fly out the door. Bottle cozies made by a friend from bolts of cloth featuring Penn State, Philadelphia Eagles or Pittsburgh Steelers logo are another favorite.

“People have taken to us,” Scott said. “Think about it. How many people in central Pennsylvania have ever had a barrel tasting?”

The winery trades on the wilderness theme. It’s designed like a lodge, and decorated with wasp nests, an antler chandelier, and stone fireplace. The tasting bar looks like it’s made of barrel staves. Bistro tables allow folks to linger, purchasing a bottle or a glass. A deck, forbidding in the winter, must be a delight on hot summer days. A full-service kitchen allows the winery to host catered events.

Wine Cave and barrel-aged vinifera and he's only on his second vintage.

Below the 2,000- square-foot tasting room is where the magic happens. Several hundred pounds of strawberries and blueberries topped with cane sugar sit in macro bins, waiting to be fermented. He was purchasing so much distilled water for fruit wine fermentation he added a reverse osmosis system. He has a laboratory and recently purchased used power bench-mount corker to replace the hand-crank one they used for the last two vintages. He has two barrels of cabernet franc he’s saving for a limited bottling. It’s doing great and I can’t wait to try the bottled version.

They built an underground cave for aging cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon. Several barrels have customers’ names on them, part of the “adopt a barrel” program. For $500, adopters get five cases of wine over five years. Scott, meanwhile, doesn’t have as much money tied up in wood.

The wines range from sweet blends and fruit wines to carefully crafted barrel-aged vinifera. Scott pours each with the same respect. I’ve visited some eastern wineries where owners refused to pour me cayuga or fruit wines. Scott is so new in the pros, he hasn’t learned varietal discrimination yet.

His red vinifera are an achievement for eastern wines, offering color, textures and flavors difficult to accomplish. Scott’s strengths are coaxing mouthfeel and texture from his wine. Almost without exception, his sweet wines are nicely balanced with acidity and do not come off cloying.

The Bubbs and Seven Mountains exceeded my expectation, making wine with a level of skill that would typically takes a start up a decade or more. But Scott has been making wine for thirty years. Had it not been for his success at the AWS competitions and losing his job – Seven Mountains and this new phase of his life would have never happened.

“You get comfortable with a job, a certain number of hours of work, and a paycheck at the end of the every week,” he said. “If the plant hadn’t closed, I’d still be there.”

He’d be in a factory, not where he is now: a quaint comfortable winery in the woods surround by old growth forest and snow where he’s making great wine for appreciative customers.

In the down economy, Napa is getting as much sympathy as the guy with an adjustable rate mortage who bought too much house, leased a Mercedes, and faces foreclosure.

That is to say: none.

Some are happy to put a thumb in Napa's eye

Some people, even those how have forked over top dollar for Napa wines in the past, are saying “Good for them,” as though Napa vintners forced them at gunpoint to buy those top wines.

They weren’t.

Sure, nearly every Napa winery I’ve visited has a limited-production, long-lost, single-barrel, heritage vine cabernet that it sells in tasting rooms and on-line to high- fliers. (They always seem to be from Texas, for some reason). But those wines are not representative of Napa.

Frankly, I don’t have a problem with a producer charging what the market will bear, even if that price set by a Texan. Consumers love to play the capitalist card when demand collapses. They tap their foot, waiting for prices to drop. But when things are hot, demand surging and supply short — a producer with high or increasing prices is viewed as an opportunist.

Trefethen Family Vineyards: been around forever, work out of a barn, never ripped anyone off

If found this out in New York State when Red Newt made precious little of one of the most profound cabernet francs. I wasn’t the least bit surprised it broke the 90 barrier with a major wine media outlet. The wine was hardly an accident. Red Newt is regarded as one of the top producers whose wines now routinely hit 90, or damn near close. The 2007 vintage for eastern reds is already a classic, unlikely to be repeated in the next decade, though I hope I’m wrong.

The price of that vineyard-designated cabernet franc broke $30 barrier. Some consumers and industry observers groused. It sickened me that owner/winemaker Dave Whiting had to defend the price, one justified not only by the score, but also likely by the cost and effort, and confirmed by the people who would gladly pay it again and again, were any bottles left. Demand and scarcity translate into price.

A great idea that never took root

Contrary to the stereotype of Napa as a millionaire’s playground, most of its 400-plus Napa wineries aren’t much differnet from Red Newt. Most are small, family-owned operations, headed by folks who leveraged a fortune for the chance to dote over vines like bonsai trees and babysit fermentations like soufflés to come up with something unique and high-quality to offer. Generally, the price these producers charge is not out of line given the overhead and craftsmanship.

I don’t think it’s fair that Napa gets lumped in with Champagne– where price gouging in the heady market appeared to have been a mass movement. In 2007, I discussed inflationary prices of Bordeaux with Jean-Michel Cazes, owner of Chateau Lynch-Bages, the Pauillac “Fifth Growth.” He shook his head in disbelief at the prices carried by the wines made by his neighbors. Not even he could understand a wine could be worth $700. Mr. Cazes said he could double his prices and still sell all his wine, but he would lose the customers who supported him for many years. Higher-end customers, he said, have less loyalty. He could make more money, but changing your customer base is a huge risk. He’s right. Loyal “LB” fans I know are electricians, police officers and teachers. It’s a blue collar Classified Growth.

Champagne learned Cazes’ lesson the hard way. As they sit on one billion unsold bottles, Europe discovers Crémant and the world sips Prosecco.

But LB”s hesitancy to increase the price of its flagship wine is not a reasonable comparison with Napa wineries or Red Newt, who have a full slate of wines at several price points and styles. For all its reputation for cult wines and high prices, Napa has always had under $25 or under $20 options. Now more than ever. Napa built up an aura of exclusivity, of price perception, that hurts it now.

I'll take that, Mr. Tchelistcheff. I think it's worth it.

A recent New York Times magazine article with an unfortunate headline described the near crisis Napa producers face. I caught the first wiffs of problems during my last visit there in 2008. Now Napa marinates in malaise. Copia, the Napa food and wine center, which I really enjoyed, filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and closed soon after. I imagine it to be like a huge tomb now.

Non-reactive walls, full-spectrum lighting, negative air pressure, nutrients through a door -- we were lab rats.

It’s often called mercaptan and it’s a common fault in wine. The UGI bill insert was just in time to offer me a refresher as I headed off to Penn State’s H.J. Heinz Sensory Analysis Laboratory for a session of the Pennsylvania Quality Wine Initiative Panel, an industry-sponsored program to identify and reduce faulty wines in the Keystone State.

Conscientious Pennsylvania wineries submit their wines to be subjected to laboratory analysis and our trained panel for fault and quality evaluation. Unlike a wine competition, this panel is rigorously trained. It took two weekends, covering the history of food analysis and processes like Quantitative Descriptive Analysis, widely used in the food industry and among large wineries. Then we spent days smelling wine faults. It was like putting your nose through a 20-mile march through a swamp.

With the loss of Penn State’s enology extension agent, the program is run on an interim basis by Mario Mazza, a former assistant winemaker at Two Hands in Australia, and winemaker at Mazza Vineyards in the Erie, Pennsylvania, region. Mario knows his stuff. He did his graduate research on “bitter.” Did you know 10 percent of the population is “bitter blind” and few victims of the condition even know it?

Mario Mazza: Drill Sergeant at the Parris Island of the Palate

In the training, we were presented with a series of samples – base wine spiked with a fault in various concentrations. Isolated in a stall with a sliding door and a computer, it’s easy to feel like a laboratory rat. Trays of samples were fed through the door. We were being tested, not the doctored wines, to find our thresholds: at what point we could detect a fault, at what concentration we could identify it, then at what point we think the fault could be called a flaw, and what point an objectionable fault.

Thanks to advances in flavor chemistry, we know the names of those nasty smells that popped up in wine for eons.

Science Name Common Descriptions

Isolvaleric acid Sweat saddle, rancid

4-ethyl guaiacol liquid smoke, (Brett component)

4-ethyphenol Band-aid, (major Brett component)

Ethyl acetate nail polish remover (volatile acidity)

Acetic acid vinegar (volatile acidity)

Acetaldehyde sherry, acrid

2,4,6 trichloranisole (TCA) cork taint, musty cardboard

Sulfur dioxide, SO2 acrid tingling

Hydrogen disulfide H2S rotten eggs

Ethanethiol onion, rubber

Diethyl disulfide garlic, burnt rubber

Wet Keys, completely waterproof. You can spill, cry, or vomit and continue working.

Some faults got dropped from the program because they were either rare, not really faults, or the chemical preparations to make them were just too expensive: acrolein (wet dog, who knew?), diacetyl (butter, caramel, often not a fault), others such as geranium and mouse taint.

As if four long days of smelling those things in 2007 wasn’t enough, every time the panel convenes, we go through the process again. Mario has been moving the concentrations down, to get a better handle of each panelist’s individual thresholds. During a break, a panelist remarked. “When is he going to start putting stuff in the wine?” Mario has a big file on each of us somewhere.

For very young tasting panels, and pre-literate wine judges.

Everyone’s ability to sense is unique, based upon God-given ability and experience. I’m sensitive to acetaldehyde, and 4-ethyl phenol (brett), able to ID them at very low concentrations. I’ve found shortcuts that are meaningful only to me for other faults. 4-ethyl guaiacol makes wine smell sweet, like BBQ ribs or something. Acetaldedehyde smells to me like tin. The first sign of TCA is that it wipes out the wine’s smells before it turns into wet cardboard.

Eventually, we get to try actual Pennsylvania commercial wines. A faults panel looks only for faults. A hedonic panel scores on the modified Davis 20-point scale common in wine competitions. Our results and comments get back to winemakers. Many winemakers are frustrated from regional competitions and their judges’ comments, Mario told us. They hope to get more valuable comments from our trained panel. So we tasted wines that recently did well in a regional competition, but that some industry leaders felt “weren’t representative of the quality wines of Pennsylvania.” In other words, they sucked. Mario wanted to see what a trained panel thought.

But the wines were all tasted blind, so we won’t know. They were also randomly presented, so a teeth-chattering ice wine may be followed by a delicate pinot noir. Mario said randomly ordering the wines makes the results scientifically relevant. Besides, we had to rinse with water and wait 40 seconds between tastes – the computer in the hamster booth told us to.

There are 140 wineries in Pennsylvania. They are not all making good wine. Part of the reason for this program is to help everyone elevate their game and separate the commercially superior from the plonk. Eventually, this program may evolve into something like the VQA system in Ontario.

Some of the wines, which ranged from ice wines and labrusca to cabernet sauvignon and riesling, were outstanding. Most were good. I was happy – proud even — of my state’s industry. A handful were reductive, loaded with the nose-singeing levels of SO2, or filtered and fined within an inch of their lives – rookie mistakes. But that’s why this panel exists.

I was careful with my commentary, hoping to provide useful feedback. Going through the process gives me a better understanding of my sensory strengths and limitations.

If I ever have a natural gas leak in my home, or a vinegar spill, or nail polish remover release – I’ll be ready.

When I learned Scranton’s only freestanding wine bar closed, I was at a trade event in France for Loire wines, unable to mourn with others on Dionysus Wine Bar’s final nights.

In the press room at the Salon des Vins de Loire, wine writers from nations with a

M.J. Dougherty: great idea, wrong state.

history of royalty, fascism, and communism, could hear me curse the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.

Dionysus Wine Bar combined sleek modernity and coziness. But most importantly, it approached wine seriously. The bar ran off the passion of proprietor M.J. Dougherty. Despite his youth, he had a wealth of knowledge and the gift of a good palate. I consider M.J. a friend.

As a local wine writer, I’m the comment department for all things wines, so I heard complaints of Dionysus’ limited selection and questions about the $7 per glass price. Dionysus didn’t have a wine dispensing/preservation system and I knew the M.J. ended up with waste at the end of the night as he resisted the common practice of serving opened red wines the next night, and the night after that. Wine margins were thin. Over time, Dionysus shifted to the more lucrative, quick-turning beer and spirits sales. Also, the young establishment found itself in the worst economy in generations.

A good time, good memories at Dionysus

At the heart of this whodunit – the phantom menace Dionysus’s biggest fans may not be aware of, is the state-run alcohol monopoly, the PLCB –which stacked the deck against this entrepreneur before the idea of opening a wine bar ever occurred to him. In fact, the PLCB’s onerous practices dampen the entire market for wine in bars and restaurants in Pennsylvania by making it a money loser rather than a money maker.

Here’s how. In freeAmerica, wine stores, restaurants and bars are middle men. They purchase wine at wholesale prices – typically 50 percent of retail price. Wine retailers typically double the price. A restaurant or wine bar sometimes as much as triples it, or nets at least that much in by-the-glass sales. In free states, profit on alcohol is much greater than that on food.

Not in Pennsylvania. Wine and spirit stores are owned and operated by the state government. They don’t want Pennsylvania citizens buying their wine from restaurants and bars, preferring they purchase from “state stores” so the system can capture the entire mark-up. So the state treats bars and restaurants as end users, just like consumers, essentially charging them full retail price for a bottle of wine. (They offer a mere 10 percent off full retail, dubbed the “licensee discount” as though they are doing licensees a favor. But sale prices consumers pay are often lower.)

This structure makes it nearly impossible for businesses to make a profit, or anywhere near the profit margin businesses outside of Pennsylvania earn for selling wine. Bottom line: Pennsylvania bars and restaurants have little incentive to sell wine.

Next time you are out, ask your Keystone State restauranteur how they get their wine and spirits delivered – because they don’t. They have to order it at a “state store” in advance, pray to Bacchus it comes in, then go to the state store and pick it up. In states with a free market, private distributors and their commissioned sales people drive through snow storms and deliver gift wrapped cases to restaurants and bars or risk an unhappy client. That’s how capitalism works, kids.

Why would someone build a business model around these low margins, the state’s limited selection, the inconvenience of dealing with a broken bureaucracy? I blame M.J.’s entrepreneurialism, hard work, and optimism for being in the wrong state.

As I grumbled through France, I shared the finer points of the PLCB with Richard Kelley, a U.K. importer and Master of Wine. He was familiar with Pennsylvania’s government-run system, but kept shaking his head in disbelief at my first-hand accounts.

An abundance of character, a chequered past, and blend of I-don’t-give-a-f*** and random disarming charm makes him an easy character to write about. I’ve never met him, but New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear did and last year she did what seemed like an accurate portrait of the man that many consider a blight on wine world.

I think of the head of Bronco Wine Company as a guy who makes cheap wine — and sometimes very good wine for the money.

I’m one of those people who drinks wine on just about any occassion. I realize today I’m in a minority.

Later I will attend a Super Bowl party of a Saints fan. I’m sure he’ll take affirmative action and put out a few wine bottles for my benefit. I may bring a bottle with a fleur-de-lis on it, Clos du Bois maybe, or Monmousseau.

If I were doing it, it would be something like this, as recounted in last week’s wine column. Some of the pairings include Tuscan red with pizza, cabernet franc with guacamole, oaky chardonnay with nachos, and a good syrah with meaty subs (a.k.a. hoagies or grinders).

David Falchek unscrambles the complex world of wine. Cutting through the uninteresting and uninspiring, David finds wines that over-deliver for the price or that offer something special. Firm in the belief that wine should an everyday drink for everyone, he loathes the word connoisseur and despises snobbery.

In addition to his weekly column that appears the Pennsylvania and New York publications, David's work has appeared in several wine magazines and he serves often as a wine judge. Based in Scranton, Pa., David is also a fan of non-West Coast wines with a particular affinity for those of Pennsylvania and New York.